One of the fascinating elements lacking from the discussion regarding COVID-19 is its obvious seasonality. I think it’s a fair point to say at the beginning of the pandemic, researchers really didn’t have enough information to say much about the coronavirus as a seasonal phenomenon. Plus, it WAS novel, and who knows? It might actually be the Andromeda Strain.

As time has rolled on, it’s certainly proved NOT to be, though there are still lots of government officials in both Europe and the US who are desperately clinging to the notion. Low v-Meme folks gonna low v-Meme, and that means manipulating people into a frothy limbic panic about their loved ones dying, while offering no nuanced, long-term perspective (as well as individual remediation) for the threat posed. As I’ve written earlier, instead of the holistic discussion we really need about how we can come together around an issue of public health, we see instead intense “binning” into Left/Right perspectives, as well both sides playing Tweetle Beetle paddle games with their respective, preferential tools. See diagram below in case your memory needs refreshing on this Dr. Seuss classic.

But there ARE interesting — and important things to understand regarding COVID – namely the effect of the balance between seasonality and sociality in the spread of the bug. Seasonality — well, we can’t do much about that. But sociality definitely can matter, though exactly how much, we can’t be sure. There is no way to run a real, controlled experiment on people with viruses. So we rely on our unintentional “experiments” , like cruise ships and prisons. With regards to appropriate sociality and seasonality, we do know when these two things come together, COVID spreads literally like wildfire — even if the consequences are not as dire as many have portrayed them as.

It’s in that spirit that I offer up this thought experiment — what does this graph of COVID deaths in Nevada tell us?

Nevada’s a fascinating state. First off, it is relatively high elevation — the Great Basin does indeed have some low spots (Nevada is adjacent to Death Valley, which is below sea level!) but most of it is medium-high plains desert. It doesn’t get more empty than the Great Basin’s version of the Big Empty along US 50. At the same time, most of its population is concentrated into urban areas, where the effect of that concentration can create meaningful, significant (but of course, tragic) data.

As such, the latter part of its COVID deaths track the shape of other high elevation US locations, like South Dakota and Montana. Starting around the middle of June, we see the classic seasonality shift toward a summer respiratory season that exists in other locations. Here’s Montana, for example. A light, seasonal COVID season — but well-pronounced as far as that High Plains pattern.

So here’s the thought exercise. I’m guessing that Nevada’s COVID death curves give some representation of a balance of sociality and seasonality of the pandemic. Las Vegas was certainly the start of COVID deaths that led to that hump in March and April. Sociality mattered, and drove heavy, continual dosing of Las Vegas from around the US and gave us that first part — meaning that for a green field pandemic, sociality can matter.

But nothing can really match the power of seasonality. When it’s time for viral spread, you get it. That would be the second hump. High, dry climates aren’t conducive to viral spread anyway, so we see low overall percentages of deaths relative to other parts of the U.S. And Nevada has no super-spreader system like New York City.

It’s worth spending some time with the Google COVID death tool and see how your state, or country is faring — and then apply your own intuition. The results are surprising.

One of the interesting hypotheses that DEFINITELY NEEDS MORE WORK, BUT IS LIKELY TRUE is the idea that, through Conway’s Law, values from the social organization transfer into the products developed by organizations will inherently embody the values that those organizations hold. We can revisit the Intermediate Corollary in these three slides, which say:

There are big implications here — by linking together value sets/v-Memes of social organizations to the instantiations in knowledge and actual design, we are implying that, at least for certain products, that more than just a canonical structure connection, actual values move into the product being created.

Let’s think about a couple of examples that alternately illustrate (or not) this principle.

What if your organization was designing tools that were for the general public, but no one in your organization was left-handed? What would happen if your organization was more focused on refinement of your current brand, and did not engage in customer research? Odds are your organization would certainly have a hard social boundary, regardless of relationships inside that boundary. And if that organization had inherited past product lines, refinement of those products would likely be the primary driver of any R&D efforts. AND, through omission, your organization, having an inherent bias against left-handed people, would only test such tools inside the organization. The products would be refined for right-handed people, and one would transfer that low developed empathy, discriminatory perspective into the product. Sure — it would be plenty safe for right-handed people. But left-handed people? How would you know to care? Check out this publication — for most folks, that handedness/neurodiversity is non-triggering , even though the conclusion is stunning– and that’s the reason I’m using it!

Clearly, it’s not necessarily true for all the parts of larger products. Teams of aerodynamicists have refined wing cross-sections according to the laws of fluid dynamics for the past 100+ years. Highly specialized teams studying Guiding Principles of transonic flow have honed the shapes of airfoils for maximum performance. But note the introduction of Guiding Principles (really a Global Systemic/Holistic v-Meme knowledge structure) into the mix. These principles are well-known, and alternately pull the designers up into a higher space, or compensate for their lack of empathetic development.

Contrast that with the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS disaster, that caused the loss of two airliners due to a runaway control system for stall safety. The flight control system was optimized using the laws of physics, and though flight control is super complicated, it’s likely that when the system was working, and all the sensors were operative, everything would have worked fine.

Except that wasn’t the case. Boeing’s rigid hierarchy outsourced the controls and interfaces to an Indian software vendor for completion. The inherent value assumptions embodied in the MCAS were that, in a potential flight divergence scenario, humans would be far inferior than the algorithms developed by the team. The combo of two rigid hierarchies — Boeing and the Indian software firm decided that humans SHOULD NOT HAVE AGENCY to turn off such a system. So, inherently, those values propagated into the design of the emergency system, which made it almost impossible to disengage, and caused the loss of two aircraft before the 737 MAX fleet was grounded! A direct, implicit (and emergent) value transfer!

One can see, through this example, the perils in developing systems in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) with non-diverse teams, as value transfer becomes even more problematic. AI developers may develop a system that follows a fair amount of axiomatic rigor in how a given ML system seeks an optimum. An attitude of “Just the facts, sir” may sound good on the surface. But datasets used to train such systems may inherently have bias written in them as far as collection (e.g. men are better than women doing math — it’s in the data!) And the extension is that such systems, once again, would be low on respecting human agency in the first place. The ML system would be, of course, smarter than the humans in the same problem space. And SHOULD be given authority because of a variety of reasons, including a more unbiased following of rules.

And that’s how you end up with low empathy AI — immediate value transfer from Authoritarian/Legalistic hierarchies into the products that are developed.

The examples above show how inherent bias is actually deeply memetic. But to say it’s unavoidable is also a cop-out. If we look at 2nd Tier, higher Global Systemic v-Meme processes, where deep reflection and “knowing what we might not know/metacognition” is inherent in organizational, cultural practice, we can escape some of the worst of emergent, implicit value transfer. By having diverse teams, we can dodge many a bullet as well explicitly — even if most folks don’t understand the whole idea of values transfer. The simple statement “We just don’t know enough about our users” is also very powerful, if it propels further engagement with larger relational/customer communities.

You don’t need to have folks understand the deep memetics of this blog to be a success. As I wrote in this piece,  Stuart Russell offers an intuitive walk up the psycho-social evolutionary pyramid in Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.

But for those new to the blog — you can also study up a bit on knowledge structures, and then back-check your work explicitly. That’s the point of the road map I’m laying out.

Last week, I finally ponied up the time to watch ‘The Social Dilemma‘, the show on Netflix where various (mostly) middle 30s men engage in lamentation and plead for expiation for the creation of social media (nominally Facebook) that has made them a.) very rich, and b.) given them a permanent spot on the paid lecture circuit to perform this lamentation in public — and now on TV. There are a couple of professors helping out with the sacred rites, who are obviously Skinnerian behavorists. But most of it is scenes of teenagers being scanned into Facebook’s magic computers and thrashing about in increasing depression as the FaceBorg takes over their brains.

I might be being a little histrionic here (I am, actually, but hey — this is my blog) but what the show does do is show what happens when a group of individuals at a certain v-Meme level get together to do a production with a matched v-Meme group of worried prophets (the creators of the beast) and then project that worldview outwards. In this case, the group is highly status-driven, Legalistic Authoritarians — they do have a moral view about how their creation works, and they’re more than happy to stand up and tell people that now, in hindsight (note the poor consequentiality of their thinking process) they see the error in their ways.

And what is, from their v-Meme perspective, the error in their ways? They unleashed a monster onto the world public where people who have no control over their own agency, can be manipulated over time into buying stuff off of Amazon that other people with their same interests want to buy. And in the process, they might discover that their friends, who might even be suburban housewives, like QAnon.

It’s not that the various folks’ observations are totally incorrect — and that’s a big part of the project with criticizing The Social Dilemma. But the view that social media is somehow only unidirectionally causal is the broken viewpoint here. Like Dolly Parton once (potentially aprocryphally) said, “If I didn’t have ’em, I would have had ’em made.” Like it or not social media is emergent out of the world system that we have now. And the fact that people finally refined it and made it so easy to use AND addictive should surprise no one. Remember Myspace? I’ve read software critique pieces about the real reasons that Myspace failed — and it was mostly poor execution. That’s, for good or bad, how tech. works. Round One may suck. But humans, being the clever monkeys they are, come back around and turn the Wright Flyer into a Boeing 747 — if there’s a market. And there was.

The general premise of The Social Dilemma is that Facebook and Twitter invented these machines that collect your personal data, and then mirror that back to you in a not-subtle, manipulative way. In the process, not only do they sell you bike socks you might like (personal confession — I love cool bike socks) but they start slowly, or maybe not-so-slowy aggregating your beliefs as well, feeding you the toxic sludge of whatever side of the political debate you happen to be on. After a while, though you might have been non-political before, you’ve been migrated into what recent fellow podcast guest sharer John Robb calls “Networked Tribes”. John’s an astute fellow, and I’ll write a bit more about him in another piece. At any rate, this Periscope/podcast below held by Twitter pal Adam Townshend has John and me talking about this very issue:

https://www.periscope.tv/w/1yoKMXjdNNDxQ?q=Pezeshki

The thing that is problematic is that the same people that created the various beasts are now, supposedly imbued with both agency and insight — things they didn’t have before — loose on the world carrying what is largely a message that social media is addictive, and all the folks out there in the world have no agency and are succumbing to mind control because of it. And the tag-on message is this: THERE IS NO WAY OUT.

Other than the last part, there is a good hunk of truth that social media is addictive. True story — I consider myself somewhat addicted. But I also know that when I’m away from the computer, in the middle of the wilderness, I’m not addicted. I don’t think about what’s happening on my Twitter feed when I’m on the river. Sometimes for obvious reasons.

It’s also true that social media profoundly affects those with low agency — the ability to take information and think for themselves. Especially if the media stream already feeds into their mental models of how the world works. I’ve written a ton, for example, on COVID-19, and I’ve yet to have any professorial colleague come up to me and thank me for my extensive work. Mostly because my work is deep-systemic in nature, and aside from members of the European epidemiological community, the Belief Zeitgeist is that COVID-19 is the Andromeda Strain. And that is decidedly not a view my work supports. I write for our local paper — and yeah, I get a modest amount of hate mail for that viewpoint. From professors.

One of the things that is consistent in this type of criticism is that young people are being programmed to do whatever awful things old people who mostly, in this society, resent young people, can dream up. This kind of projection absolutely drives me nuts. Mostly because a large part of my socialization is with undergraduate college students, who really are, for the most part, decent individuals, though often unruly and poorly raised. And secondly, because I am someone who is paid by society (and young people’s student loans) to engage in that programming. Which mostly doesn’t stick. I’m in year 33 of being a professor at Washington State University, and nothing really works to program young people’s brains with a monolithic worldview. It’s bits and pieces. Life is waiting to take those bits and pieces and consolidate them. And those experiences are largely going to come from the economic system we’ve set up, with its widening income gap and desperate destabilization of folks’ abilities to meet basic needs. That’s the real programming.

No one also seems to be asking what, exactly, does social media provide that gives it an ‘in’ in creating an endless desire for the latest brand of tennis shoe? The answer is obvious — young people use social media for their level of connection, which for many is not deeply meaningful. Yes, young people care about the latest styles of clothes, and trends in music. But many of them care about other things as well — look at things like the Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for the Future, or the Sunrise Movement. A lot of them are not looking forward to a brighter future, and are alternately lashing out, or facing their own depression about their prospects. But the main thing of almost every exchange is still the same. They are looking for others to connect with. We are a social species. And the fact that folks in Silicon Valley have figured out how to both meet, as well as hijack that social need, should surprise no one.

If FaceBorg is not directly causal, as I insist with my argument that young people (as well as all people) have some degree of agency in how they think about things, what exactly is social media? The answer is not simple, but the short version is that for the astute, social media is a sensor network as much as anything that tells us about the state of our society today.

And what does that tell us? It tells us what most of us already know. That we live in a world where our institutions of connection are decaying or collapsing. We live in a world where old modes of social organization that used to supply at least some safety and protection from loneliness are really not doing too well at all. I hesitate to use the standard verbiage “under attack”. It’s not obvious that there is so much an explicit agenda that is causing these problems inasmuch as it is an emergent phenomena, brought on by decaying economies that provide smaller and smaller public spaces, less time for people to connect, and a corrupt body politic that seems to have lost any will for evolving a society for the good of its people.

Social media is not the direct cause of any of this, though it certainly can shine a light on all of it, as well as be used as a tool by the empathy-disordered to create even more of this. The very format of social media — short, poorly empathy informed soundbites — reinforces the Authoritarian Knowledge Structure.

Groups do form that informatically press back against these trends. In a complex society, the emergent power of empathy is always present. In the face of an increasingly status-driven press corps, we see older reporters starting Patreon and Substack accounts for longer form investigative reporting. Complexity and population density demand it.

And social media is what I call a memetic bandwidth amplifier as well. Because of the structure that I discuss in the paragraph above, social media does give the Authoritarians the upper hand. Look at how young the term ‘social media influencer’ is.

But make no mistake — young people, as well as social media, did not create the world we live in. They have simply not had the time to fuck it up. Old people have done that, and they are rigorously averse to assuming responsibilities for their sins, nor using anything resembling acquired wisdom to fix the circumstance. Even a stable school system where kids wouldn’t have to worry about getting shot would be a start, and we can’t even seem to do that. Never mind more advanced concepts of bildung, where we attempt to build integrity, agency and character into our young people – as well as usable life skills and an understanding of history.

What does social media really do? The real victims of The Social Dilemma are not mind-controlled. They are depressed. And that’s what should really worry us. Why are our young people depressed? Could it be because of social media and ad clicks? Or is it due to real things, like imminent poverty, the metabolic syndrome crisis and incumbent problems with obesity, and a lack of meaning and connection? Followers of my blog know I’m solidly in the latter camp. A society that loses the energy of its young people IS in peril of collapse. I have first-hand experience harnessing that energy in my Industrial Design Clinic. When directed with love, it is awesome and awe-inspiring.

Which, unfortunately, the youngish men in The Social Dilemma cannot seem to see. Or at least they never mention it. Their worldview has not fundamentally been changed from their original insulated solipsism. They were responsible for changing the world by inventing social media. And they were the ones that opened the Pandora’s Box. If only they could get the damn thing closed.

But anyone that knows anything about the actual story of Pandora’s Box knows you can’t shut it after all the bad things fly out. And at the end of the story, the only thing left in the box is Hope. Which can be a fine thing. But Hope alone will not suffice. Hope is the desire for change without action. The way the larger mind must deal with the problems exposed both with, and by social media, is to look at the root causes of our problems. And that is something, for a variety of reasons, Silicon Valley is loathe to look at.

I’ve been a bit remiss in posting lately, but the squirrels have been super-busy in my head. I’ve been building a chest of drawers in my woodshop as part of a quarantine project, and have kind of been lazy about writing. I have a big post coming on what I call “validity grounding” — how people within the different v-Memes/value sets form the basis for coherent action, that answers major concerns about how we will have to develop people to coordinate as our world becomes more complex.

Here’s a still life from the woodshop.

A question popped up on Twitter about why the subject of marketing was taught in colleges, but not sales. As one knows, it’s impossible to look at a single concept and pigeonhole it into a given value set. But the cursory answer is that marketing can be taught as a low-empathy science, with algorithmic techniques, whereas sales is heavily dependent on personal interaction — something that the academy does poorly at.

In response, Maggie 美智幸子@MaggieSachiKhoo replied with some doubt (that’s OK!) and linked this wonderful article which is essentially about growing empathy between sales and marketing — but could be used as a blueprint for merging any two areas. It’s pretty basic, but looking at my presumptions I’ve made with recent blog posts, I thought it might be nice to give a simple example that I found really resonant.

One more time — the article title is 10 Lessons from 10 years in marketing and 10 in sales by Nathan Skinner, a former VP for Salesforce. He covers almost the whole knowledge structure stack, from myths (customer stories) to shared goals, to rational empathy development, with great points about walking in others’ shoes.

A tip of the hat to friend, Ugo Bardi! And Benjamin Steele, one of my frequent commenters, who were after me to read this book.

I’ve just finished Julian Jayne’s masterwork, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. As I usually do, I listened to the book on Audible, which makes pulling quotes impossible. But the advantage (I do this while I’m riding my bike) is that I am also able to think concurrently, which I simply can’t do while I’m reading.

The book was published in 1976, and as any text that delves into the neuroscience, Jaynes’ insights were severely proscribed by the neuroscience of his time, as well as the fact that he didn’t have access to any thoughts on evolved empathy.

Jaynes writes primarily about personal development in a collective framework — he did not have the concepts available to him that I have. But the work is stunning in the context of what he does describe — a traversal of human development from Survival bands, up through the Legalistic/Absolutistic societies of the Axial Age. Jaynes was (I believe) the first to really nail down the premise that ancient people, quite literally, didn’t think like us — something I’ve written about extensively in the context of memetic development. His basic premise is that humans started off with environmentally-based, stimulus-developed consciousness, then evolved into the bicameral/split mind, not unlike modern-day schizophrenia, where the gods did most of the talking on the right side in the directing of actions. And then we evolved out of this some 500 years BCE into our more modern forms of thought, where the gods went into remission once again. Twilight of the Idols indeed.

I think part of the reason that Jaynes held this premise (he’s passed away, so we can’t have that discussion) is that Jaynes fundamentally was a sound academic, and as such, wrote from a more empirical viewpoint, consisting of fragmented archaeological evidence and epic poems, to support his hypothesis. He has an extensive litany of facts, strung together, that the more sedate might not like. I particularly liked his descriptions of eyes on statuary as part of their control mechanism. Anyone writing about immediate mirroring behavior or emotional empathy cannot discount the effect of a good stare when it comes to control. So it is no surprise that ancient people made their gods with eyes that mattered.

Jaynes makes much ado, like most, on the effect of language on the ability to generate independent agency. If you want to know yourself, you have be able to have a dialog with yourself. And that path of self-empathy prepares the mind for the higher projective functions of rational empathy. I’ve put up the empathy pyramid below as a refresher for those that need it.

For what it’s worth, I think language matters. But even placed in Jaynes’ framework, the larger evolutions in dualistic thought came after 0 CE, in particular the Zen Buddhists — it cannot be said with words, it cannot be said without words. It is also noteworthy that we still have a planet populated by people who cannot deal with ambiguity. So maybe Jaynes has a statistical point.

Where Jaynes and I part ways is in the idea that modern man fundamentally thinks differently than primitive man. Yes, I do agree with Jaynes’ premise that it was an evolution in that hardware/software combination that led to the gods and their authority. But Jaynes basically implies that we forfeited that system and kinda/sorta went back to the more data-driven consciousness of Survival v-Meme man. It’s that “went back” thing that I don’t like. We evolved new modes of being data-driven because we trained our brains with empathy, manifested with caring about others, how they might feel, and what they might do, on a larger scale, both temporally and spatially.

And here’s the thing — we never have core-dumped the old systems. So in times like the present, where we are in profound regression of our larger identities (what, for example, does it mean to be an American now?) those old systems, just like Cthulhu, are sitting in our neural depths, waiting to be retrieved. Not surprisingly, they’re obsessed with pederasty (look at QAnon) or extreme, unpredictable violence (look at the Left) in the U.S. Certainly there is some evidence-based thinking, actually on both sides, and I am NOT minimizing rational triggers — we clearly have a problem with police violence and African-Americans in this country. Or Epstein’s island. But the voice of reason is not the loudest voice playing in people’s minds. These things are not scaled statistically in the least in the arguments. The gods didn’t weight things with probabilities. Either you cut out someone’s heart, or the sun didn’t come up.

Considering the depth of the writing in the book, as well as the afterword, Jaynes obviously observed these thoughts around him. I’m betting he was chicken to point his learned finger, because the examples available to him regarding contemporary times were no less front-and-center than they are now. Might be a great example to push back with when people start talking about how full professors can talk about everything. Jaynes was a prof at Princeton — but he didn’t really generalize much of the work in the book into a modern context until his updated Afterword in 1990.

Should you read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? Maybe. I think we need more people thinking about the larger issue of social and societal coordination, especially as we see wave after wave of panic regarding COVID. Jaynes very clearly maps out how the lower v-Memes, with special attention to the Tribal/Authoritarian transition works, and how people can quite literally dump their feelings of compassion for folks that don’t agree with them — especially if they feel an existential threat. We place far too much faith on the idea that humans can’t kill other humans in modern times because of feelings. Yet example after example in recent history shows that this behavior exists. For those not quite ready to drink the empathy, DeepOS Kool-aid, yet want a scholarly, surface description of the current video game we seem to be playing, it might be time to sit down with a copy. Or an Audible recording — and come to terms with what is still ingrained in us from past development.

Postscript: There are also some fascinating questions yet to be answered as well as far as role of diet in facilitating these transitions between v-Memes. Are our brains what we eat? How did that system feed back in the construction of huge temples? That’s for another piece. But certainly interesting in the context of our current metabolic health right not.

Hanlon’s Razor — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

One of things that saturates our information world today, which drives me absolutely nuts, is the proliferation of conspiracy theories on everything from pedophilic pizza parlors to scheming Chinese scientists, making super-germs in labs. It’s not that sexual exploitation of children isn’t a problem — as we devolve into more and more segmented authoritarians, where the rich are easily removed to various sex islands, I become less and less surprised. And I’d never doubt that various powers-that-be wouldn’t think of germ warfare against other humans. That’s historic.

But even in perversion, or destruction, v-memetic rules must be followed, at least if there are people involved. Authoritarian bosses are far more likely to place concubines in the office next door, instead of in some far-off Shangri-la. And germ warfare is also much more likely to take place with some smallpox-laced blankets, seized in desperation by freezing indigenous people trapped on reservations, than the more elaborate schemes of dispensing through hidden microchips triggered by 5G signals.

History is full of the types of horrid excesses that humans liked to (and still do) inflict on other humans, as well as our other fellow travelers in the animal and plant world. But more diabolical means require social organization, and like it or not, they also require empathy development. You simply can’t get to requisite complexity without information coherence. And that comes with growing a conscience. Sure, there might be a few that don’t get there. But statistically, most will.

Even if you consider some of the wilder things we’ve done — the atomic bomb comes to mind — these are things that could not have been developed without long, empathetic supply chains, working synchronously toward a larger, if in the end ignoble goal. Part of the reasons the Nazis lost WWII was not that their armaments were more poorly designed than the Allies. They lost because of reliability issues because they conscripted slave labor forces to build their various airplanes and Panzer tanks. Drop some dirt in that transmission, now, won’t you? Think about THAT supply chain.

It’s also fair to say that all bets are off when technology is captured. Terrorists are far more likely to use a nuclear bomb than a nation-state, because in order to make that bomb requires a higher form of social evolution than a terrorist, stuck in a neo-tribal mindset, is going to possess. We live in a world now where the folks that developed the technology have exited the stage, and darker forces have picked up on its potential.

Examples? We sell F-16 jets to Pakistan, but leave our own Air Force guards to guard against their unauthorized use. An article I read today about selling F-35s to Turkey, which at some level we are contractually bound to do, as Turkey is a NATO country, was puzzling through similar problems. An F-35, imperfect as it is, is a tremendous piece of networked firepower. Do we really want Turkey to have a combined AWACS/super-cruise fighter so close to active Russian military forces? As US hegemony declines, the dangers of war are not so much about people attacking the homeland. They are of rival powers squaring off to fight old, unresolved fights. Escalations between India and China are but a recent example.

But back to conspiracies. One of the ones that has been making the rounds regarding COVID was that Chinese were scheming around germ warfare regarding coronaviruses, and the virus escaped from the lab to give us our contemporary pandemic. Large and monolithic, the CCP was attempting to give itself an ultimate killer weapon, when things went awry in the lab. Because of that famed Chinese coordination (ever watched that video of all the Chinese children bouncing balls in a circle together) they managed to pull it ALL off. Until, well, they didn’t, and then they went around silencing and killing people, including doctors who might expose their plot to activate the killer bug with 5G technology.

Give me a break. This is the chronic wrong-headed comparison I see made in the popular (and serious) literature between things that kids can do that adults can’t, inevitably attributed to a distortion of empathy. Kids can play that spaghetti tower game better than a group of hospital execs. or lawyers, but you sure wouldn’t want a bunch of 8-year-olds running a hospital. Though you might want a group of 8-year-olds running a hospital if your other alternative was a bunch of lawyers! (Sorry, all my lawyer friends. I couldn’t resist!)

That doesn’t mean that I believe there is zero chance of COVID-19 starting from the lab in Wuhan. I actually think there is a probability of failure with any containment exercise in germ research. There’s a reason why there are different labs with different biohazard ratings. And there is also likely the chance for certain types of failure that should preclude any experimentation on certain types of viruses. It’s simply too unsafe. But that kind of thing is the result of human hubris — not conspiracy. The short answer is this — once a given complexity/sophistication threshold is exceeded, the chance of failure is real. And failure is going to only be realized if you run the experiment over and over again.

Conspiracies, especially complicated ones, require a certain memetic stew that just doesn’t exist in the real world — or at least very often. You have to have smart people, taking Authority-driven direction, while at the same time exercising creativity in how they’re encountering obstacles that run contrary to the diabolical plans of the conspiracy. That’s not easy to do. People capable of managing complexity are also likely to be connected to lots of information sources. And that’s going to run contrary to that extreme loyalty-for-nefarious-ends that any conspiracy really needs. Any movie conspiracy, if it’s accurate, always has lots of goons. But even goons have to be paid. You don’t just sign up to be a goon. You sign up because you get some money. Or if you’re ideologically aligned, you’re also probably stupid. Look at how the protests/riots are playing out. What level of coordination are we seeing?

That said, complex, deep historic conditions CAN create conditions for disaster. But the reason disaster happens isn’t the result of coordination of conspiratorial parties. More likely, it’s the result of deep historic bills that converge on a moment, and come due. Let’s explore the potential for a viral release from a Wuhan lab.

For those that know much about China, they know that almost every kind of megafauna long ago was exterminated from most of the Chinese mainland. Most of it was eaten — it is true that Chinese people like wild game. But it’s more than that — Chinese medicine itself is close to 2500 years old, and blends a certain amount of deep holism sprinkled with magical thinking. In an Authoritarian culture (and China is most definitely an Authoritarian society) the information transference from a rhino’s horn to an erectile dysfunction cure is all too obvious. This is a fact, folks.

And as the Chinese population has exploded, harvest of any wild animal has become more and more problematic. If you had a historic food from the wild when you had a population of 200 million, you can imagine the demands on that same wild source if your population is 1.25B. It ain’t pretty — and it’s not exactly like there’s a whole lot of grounding validity. You bought those things from someone else, they were a tradition in your family, and China is laced with these traditions. China is also covered — almost every square inch — with people and their devices. There is hardly a square acre reserved as real wildlands. Contrast this to their neighbor, India, where large parks (and associated megafauna) still remain.

One of the big problems in China is that through attrition, lack of habitat, and deliberate campaigns, most of the wild bird life in China is gone. This is hard to imagine for most Westerners to imagine, but during the Great Leap Forward, Mao even ran what was called the Four Pests campaign, where people all went outside for days, banging pots and pans to keep birds aloft until they literally fell out of the sky.

Events like this can have tragic, unobserved, and un-studied consequences. Radical population devastation does not always result in a bounce-back to historic levels. Once various thresholds are crossed, the ecological balance is fundamentally altered. And other species, formerly perhaps only in mild competition with birds, can find a way not just to establish a foothold, but fill ecosystem niches formerly unoccupied by them.

This is not the first time this has happened. The classic example of more recent times was the collapse of the cod fishery off the Grand Banks. Hard draggers and trawlers essentially clear-cut the ocean floor, not just taking the ground fish, but also creating unrecoverable conditions for their future.

Into the ecosystem gap flourished another species — lobsters. Lobsters, now no longer suppressed in marginal competition with cod and other ground fish, saw exploding populations. We like to eat lobster, so we didn’t really care. But the plentiful populations of lobster are very likely linked to ground fish devastation. And now that a new equilibrium has been established, it makes it even more difficult for the cod to return — even if they possess much larger amounts of biomass, and use the system more efficiently. They simply can’t get started again. Because of those damn lobsters.

But back to China. One of the most interesting features of China is its karst topography. Karst limestone makes many of those funky looking towers of rock you see across China. And whenever you see a combo of limestone and water, there’s a ton of stuff you don’t see. That would be caves. I have never explored Chinese caves, but there’s got to be a ton of them.

And if you have caves, and no birds to compete for insects, well, guess what. You get a lot of bats. Bats that might have been marginalized before, now can flourish. Lots of bats. And bats, as we now know, carry coronaviruses. Lots of them. And they poop a lot. All those insects have to go somewhere. Bat guano is also super-valuable — it’s selling for ~$90/25 lb. bag at WalMart.

Now you have a fascinating incentivized stew that favors release of coronavirus into the human world. You’ve got the guano, of course, and people who might want to dig it up, which is obvious. (I’ve heard lately about Chinese miners — nothing about what they’re mining, but I wouldn’t be surprised.) But now you also have interested scientists, not so much interested in the poop (maybe the viruses in the poop!), but interested in stuff scientists are interested in, which, quite frankly, is often egocentric and arbitrary. When it comes to the desire to serve the public, scientists are all over the map. But they are definitely driven by their passions, less so the money. And you’ve got something fascinating to study. There are lots of accounts of Chinese coronavirus scientists going into the plethora of caves, now crowded with bats that previously didn’t exist because of bird annihilation.

Lots has been written about the phenomenon of spillover — when viruses cross the divide between animals and humans. I’ve not read David Quammen’s eponymous book, but I know David, and he’s very thorough.

At the same time that much is made of the difficulty of animal/human transmission, I think it’s also important to remember that these things are also a function of probability. Mess with enough batshit, long enough, and sooner or later, you’re likely to catch something. It’s taking that low-probability event — spillover — and repeating the trials often enough.

And so that’s what I think happened with COVID-19. I think we are always quick to blame peasants and wet markets and such. Eating bats is unappetizing, at least for those of us in the West, and it is always easy to blame the poor for our problems. And miners. Especially poop miners. Scientists, belonging to a more respectable caste, tend to skate on their responsibility. I’ve known enough scientists (and I’m one myself, though of a decidedly different sort) to appreciate that they can “follow their nose.” Even if that nose takes them into the middle of a large cave filled with bat guano.

And so they brought it out. And it was likely mishandled, which is why some of them died. So I wouldn’t completely rule out the idea that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan Infectious Disease lab.

But a conspiracy? Give me a break. See Hanlon’s Razor at the top.

In my last post on COVID-19, I discussed the two major factors that drive COVID outbreaks — seasonality, and sociality. These are “almost” guiding principle levels concepts on how COVID spreads.

Short version — when it’s dry, spread is tough. And when you’re distanced, whether through barriers like masks, or actual physical distance, dose of the virus is limited. Spread is tough, which means that vaunted R0 goes to 0. And depending on your own personal rate dynamics, you’ll either get the bug or not.

But is there a Buddha higher than Buddha, something that unites these two factors that create dose? Yep.

It’s snot. Or reflecting back down in self-similar fashion, to the individual — it’s their ability to produce mucus. If you can produce enough mucus (meaning you’ve got a healthy immune system) COVID-19 really can’t touch you. If you don’t, well you get the bug, it gets in your system, and then you get the rare, but possible Garden of Horrors that the media likes to write about. Cytokine storms, COVID toes, and what not. And a dry, hacking, cough is the dominant tell-tale.

Short version (this is supposed to be a shorty post, after all!) we need to produce more mucus. I only found two papers in the literature and DID NOT bookmark them on healthy increase of mucus production (damn!) on how to do this through diet — and they were weak, and on rats, and involved reading in between the lines on how diets of saturated fat increased mucus production. It wasn’t taken from a prophylactic viewpoint — rather, it was a noted thing of attempting to get the rats to die from heart attacks, because the medical/dietary community is into negating the value of saturated fats.

If anyone wants to point me to some more papers about saturated fats and mucus, I’m super-open to reading them. But what this really shows is how our research system needs to be, well, a little more systemic. Right now, the research system focuses on singular pathologies, and dichotomously proving something as good or bad. That’s the outcome of the knowledge production characteristics of the social structure researchers are in, so it should come as no surprise. And it doesn’t.

But what it means is that we can’t really get a grip on what makes us healthy — or moving things up to a truly different plane, like my friend Ugo Bardi’s latest passion — holobiontics — which explores not just how the human system works, but how all the partners in the human system work — gut bacteria, skin bacteria, basically everything including ourselves in our environment.

If anything, it also shows how we need more research in the medical community, looking at open questions of “how bodily systems actually work.” I’m hoping this statement isn’t taken as some Zero Sum game, where we stop looking at proving pathologies, and divert the money over to that topic. We need, instead to spend more time, and money on understanding ourselves.

And when you think about it, isn’t that the real path to enlightenment?

Note: This piece concerns itself with the social dynamics of COVID-19 and the memetic lag of various psycho-social structures for continental/multiply connected societies. Not islands, like Taiwan, New Zealand, and South Korea. If this statement doesn’t make sense to you, I recommend that you read this piece first.

The above island systems are also interesting — but they need their own piece. I do write some about Taiwan here.

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One of the questions on many people’s mind about now is “When will the pandemic be over?” With case counts quite literally soaring, from different testing regimes, it’s a fair question. We’re also bombarded, especially those or us that are educated, to “believe science” or at least “believe scientists.” What that actually means I’ve covered in other pieces. There are no simple answers in this pandemic.

At the same time, every pandemic ends. As I wrote in this piece, the smallpox pandemic that the Aztecs experienced after Cortes exited the scene (to return afterward and conquer their empire) ended with 40% of the population dying. But it ended. It’s no surprise to find that the Aztecs got hit by the double whammy of a new virus (smallpox) plus seasonality that helped spread it. According to Wikipedia, the smallpox epidemic started in May, and lasted through to September of 1520. If you’re up on the literature, this sounds familiar for low latitude countries, that, for a variety of reasons, seem to spread their respiratory viruses over the summer months.

And this virus, too, will end. As I’ve written before, COVID-19, like virtually all viruses, is intensely affected both by seasonality and sociality. Both matter. If you have a super-spreader system like the New York subway, you’re likely to err on the unlucky side (24%) of antibody seroprevalence, whereas if you have less sociality (as in rural America) you have longer periods to build asymptomatic spread and inoculate/variolate your population before the bad season comes. I’ve used the wildfire analogy before with COVID, and it seems to be catching on (though obviously no one read this blog and stole it from me — and I do not endorse all the views in that piece!)

If you ignore the sound and fury associated with recent case counts — do remember that testing is awful (this is one piece, but there are so many of these it’s mind-boggling, yet still under-emphasized,) it’s uneven, the numbers are conflated, and it’s really only championed by empirical scientists that hang their hat on that kind of thing, as well as their followers, there’s really only one gold standard of statistic that matters. And even though THAT is weak (we have no idea of the various conflations going on regarding whether someone who died was on death’s door, and just happened to get COVID at the last minute) I’m standing by COVID death counts as our tarnished measure.

And that is interesting enough. Take a look at Canada, for example. What do you see?

What you get to see is that the pandemic is functionally over in Canada. And while there are still the COVID-doomers in both the government and on the sidelines touting increased case counts, the reality is that this thing is over. Officials in Canada who were previously hollering for tighter measures, a month after deaths have gone to zero, are backpedaling. Canadians are also tired of social restrictions, and are demanding a return to a more open, empathetic society.

It’s instructive to look at Sweden as well. Their death plot looks like this:

Sweden was the nation that pursued a moderate course of action of social distancing, closing some schools, and other agency-based, voluntary restrictions with the idea that the society could move to herd immunity. Scientists in the Swedish public health authority ran the pandemic response independent of Sweden’s political government. The end result was that, of course, there was no lag at all between the population and leadership. It is true that the leadership did make mistakes, especially regarding the management of care homes. But in the end, Sweden passed through, and now has virtually no COVID cases.

I’m including Spain — another example of a modestly Authoritarian yet still a parliamentary democracy — for reasons I’ll share below:

Though there seems to be reconciliation happening (see the spikes!) in the numbers used to produce these graphs, it’s pretty clear that Spain (even with all that sunshine) is a Northern Tier country. Its pandemic was over at the end of May, and all plots I’ve seen comparing Spain to other countries indicate Spain in the upper end of effectiveness (if there really is such a thing) in COVID prevention.

One thing that is amazing is how the media enforces the COVID control narrative. This should come as no surprise — reporters are often belief-based and status-driven, and status of sources matters. You don’t maintain high-status sources by making them look bad. So if the authorities say the pandemic isn’t over, well — the v-Memes will do the talking. But some people — in the case of the video below, a doctor — are confronted with what I call grounding validity. They’re sitting in the hospital, looking at their bed stocking rates. And they have opinions. The video below is stunning in watching how that very grounding validity works against the status-based social structure of far too many contemporary journalists. Highly recommended.

As I’ve said before, I am a fan of Ivor Cummins, on Twitter as the @Fatemperor. Ivor’s in Ireland, a nutrition specialist and ex-liaison engineer that I’ve written about here. And Ivor’s not very happy about the fact that Ireland’s death total has gone to zero now for 2.5 months, yet people are still calling for lockdown. Here’s their death curve.

What does it say about the psycho-social development of Ireland that its politicians are demanding lockdowns when the pandemic is so obviously over? Nothing good about empathy. And lots about the residual authoritarian Catholic culture of control.

Now let’s talk about the United States.

As I said earlier, COVID spread is a combination of seasonality and sociality. The seasonal aspect shows up in the US in two ways — the northern tier big bump came, peaking in April, and augmented by our super-spreader system called the airline system. The southern tier is following similar seasonal dynamics of low-latitude countries, with some type of peak mid-summer. This type of behavior can be seen in other countries as well, regardless of human intervention. Peru had a severe lockdown, but is demonstrating a similar curve. Colombia, less so, but the same pattern.

Sociality can make a difference, and also matters in the US — I saw an analysis of New Orleans around Mardi Gras — a big spike coming from the influx of travelers. But then things died down until seasonality came back in the early summer.

In the US, none of our authorities explain any of this with any sense of consequentiality. Instead, what we hear are shaming messages if we don’t agree, and overt politicization of the pandemic. I’ve written over and over that what causes pandemics to be held at bay is a.) coherence of action of the population, as well as b.) timing of interventions. It doesn’t do much good, for example, to have a lockdown once the bug has already spread.

What is more interesting to me is the messaging regarding, as well as time delays for admission that the pandemic is over, is the evidence that it gives for what type of v-Memetic system is in place inside a country. We can see Canada has maybe not the perfect system, but in the face of more rigorous measures, the people push back when the evidence isn’t there — consider them solid Communitarians. The Swedes straddle the Communitarian/Global Systemic boundary — they have the ability to take responsibility for individual actions, and at the same time hold fundamental principles of liberty as more important than the mistakes of their experts. High social cohesion also helps, and hearing public officials reflect on some of the failures demonstrate that Global Systemic v-Meme.

And what of the U.S? I’ve been following John Robb’s work lately. He’s got a great term called ‘networked tribes’ — and I’ve written about the dichotomous binning of information that has deeply affected the politicization and weaponization of the pandemic. When will our pandemic be over? It will end. But because of our v-Memetic discord, and the Networked Tribality of our message, it’s going to take a long time.

What’s the upshot of all this? Short version — pandemics are a time-dependent phenomena. This one’s been going on in the West since February for sure, peaking (dependent on latitude) in the North in April, and in the South in the middle of the summer. That’s clear from the graphs of data we sadly, actually know — people dying. The lag between people acknowledging that it’s actually over is, at some level, a memetic response of the system. The more authoritarian our system is, the less desirous it is of restoring empathy and giving up control, even in the face of clear evidence.

And here’s the deeply distressing thing. What does it mean when our system, regardless of political party, refuses to give any other interpretation to the pandemic other than we should never live a normal, free life again, under pain of death, while at the same time pushing past control actions and narratives that can be shown, through evidence, validity grounding and critical (and often complex) thought, not to work? I leave that one to you to ponder.

I’m not going to go on too much about this, as I expect this particular piece on inventing a Morality Pill will blow up on its own. In this piece, Parker Crutchfield, Associate Professor of Medical Ethics, Humanities and Law, Western Michigan University, advocates for a “morality pill” to ensure conformance with wearing masks, or other such icks, that are deemed by authorities to be socially beneficial.

Never mind the difficulty in developing such tech. — pharma companies are notoriously bad in developing any such pill that actually lasts, and the idea that flooding brains with one-size-fits-all chemicals is truly atrocious — it just doesn’t work. What is really interesting (well, at least if you’re coming to this blog in the middle of Outer Space!) is the full-on display of the memetics of rigid, hierarchically driven social structures! In the piece, Crutchfield advocates for a dopamine/something pill because

“Democratically enacted enforceable rules – mandating things like mask wearing and social distancing – might work, if defectors could be coerced into adhering to them. But not all states have opted to pass them or to enforce the rules that are in place.”

When I talk about how values inside the social structure transferring to values inside the design instantiation (in this case, a conformance pill) I can’t really think of a better example. A pill is the uber-identifiable Authoritarian fragment (if folks would take this, everyone would just think the same!) And also a totally unrealistic solution, on any level. Brave New World, anyone?

To be fair, Crutchfield does disclose this is a thought exercise. But these kinds of things get to be wearying. The viewpoint never once mentions human development, or creating a larger sense of responsibility inside a society so when this happens, folks, having NOT been lied to about a dozen different things, actually listen to their experts, and act on their agency to create coherence and conformance. What about having a thoughtful conversation on raising ethical folks in the first place?

If the COVID-19 pandemic will show anything over the long run, it is that two of the most COVID-winning societies relied on developed agency and empathy to beat the bug. Those two societies, Sweden and New Zealand, attacked the problem at their v-Meme level where they were at. One (Sweden) was faced with the “continental spread” problem, and while they started rough, they’re now ending strong. The other (New Zealand) was faced with the “Island containment” problem, and, at least temporarily, used social cohesion and developed agency to solve their problem. I don’t know enough about the other big winner – Vietnam – but if I had to guess, having been there, won through powerful residual homogeneous national identity that got everyone on the same page.

One thing the author also does not discuss is the presence of High Conflict People — part of the deeper problem behind a lack of meaningful disagreement. I’ve supported all sorts of interventions regarding COVID-19. One can go back and look at my blog record, with dates (just type into the Google for my site, ‘Empathy in the Time of Coronavirus’). That said, I’d never assume 100% certainty, no matter where I was. There simply wasn’t the information out there. Yet how we handle people who do assert such things is still something we have not explored during this crisis. Regardless which bin on the political spectrum you’re placing your chips.

The solution for more ethnically and culturally diverse nations like the United States will never be a pill. It’s not even a good solution for nation-states like Vietnam. As I’ve written before regarding managing complexity, there are no short-cuts for developing your people with empathetic evolution. But it would help if members of the academy themselves would put a little more thought into this. We are supposed to act like the collective brain reservoir after all.

P.S. I became aware of this post through Twitter pal Adam Townshend, who RT’ed the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics RT of the Medium publication. That Tweet didn’t last long, which is in itself memetically interesting. As I’ve maintained, academic v-Meme operating points are almost always intrinsically authoritarian — a professor recommends a pill, and that sits well in the immediate collective overmind. And yes, I even find myself drifting into the “sit down and shut up!” mode myself from time to time.

But the fact that it was also almost immediately taken down is also, maybe, a bit encouraging. There is the negative potential that The Berman Institute just didn’t want the status blow of a controversial, and largely unsupportable position. But it also might mean that we can reflect on our natural instincts and get to our better nature. That’s the power of Second Tier thinking. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

I’ve recently finished listening to Ian Urbina’s excellent book, The Outlaw Ocean, on my summertime bike rides on the Palouse. He covers a variety of topics in the book, from Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd crew chasing illegal fishing boats in the Southern Ocean, to the more quixotic adventures on Sealand, an abandoned artillery platform-cum-country just miles off the British coast.

The book is amazing insofar as the author, in writing it, actually survived to write it. There are so many opportunities offered up for assassination during witnessing that Urbina talks about, I can’t even imagine how he survived. And while I do know, from my Class V kayaking days, the attitude of managing incumbent disaster and even enjoying it, I can’t imagine the long, boring hours at sea where one might actually ponder one’s fate. Whitewater’s offers of eternal liberation show up fast and furious, and once you put in on a river, there is beauty aplenty to distract you while you navigate the indifferent forces of water and Mother Nature.

But all that time at sea — I can’t help but think of Nietzsche’s famous quote — stare into the abyss long enough, and the abyss stares back at you.

The most interesting part of the book for me was reading about treatment of the various fishing fleet crews, and the indifference of the various national masters of those fleets, towards either indirect inescapable indentured servitude, or even direct enslavement of crew members. The first form is far more prevalent than the first, but the second is also real. Urbina profiles various individuals sold as human chattels into slavery, and literally traded on the high seas. If you need a picture of modern slavery, you need to look no further. The deep reality is that it is likely not that different than the historic variety, filled with beatings and isolation. Reading the book will fill you with a contempt for Confederate revisionists, that’s for sure. Really? You think slavery was a happy time? Really?

The thing that stuck out to me more than anything, though (not surprisingly, for those that know my writing) is the larger macro labor dynamics involved. Almost all the countries profiled — Taiwan being the most notable — are rapidly rising, middle-class economies. As someone who’s been to Taiwan, I’ve often said in custom and policy it has more in common with Western Europe than its other East Asian neighbors.

But what that does is create conditions for a labor shortage — where the nastiest jobs simply cannot be filled by the native residents. And the native residents still have the demands that they historically had for (in this case) diet. Someone has to do those jobs that no one wants to do. In the case of Taiwan, it’s people from Cambodia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. And lest one think it’s only Taiwan — it’s not. There is a larger dynamic that exists in keeping people in brutal jobs. Urbina’s book leaves no doubt that fishing is one of those jobs. What happens when you generate a social welfare state in the middle of other nations grappling constantly with severe poverty? You create the dynamic for slavery.

Urbina profiles multiple times the various staffing agencies that are used to keep crews on the various nation’s fishing boats coming back, often in the face of the usual smorgasbord of brutality, including rape. What is also discussed is how little the men (and they are basically all men) are paid in the context of the work. I think the easy, go-to answer here regarding low wages is that the fishing companies themselves want to maximize profits, and of course, they do. But there’s an underlying dynamic that’s also prevalent that is likely more important. When people are paid so poorly, they cannot generate any other options for livelihoods. They have to keep coming back, no matter what the conditions. Their families, the recipients of the meager wages, need the money, and there is no way to better one’s economic prospects. So they are literally “wage slaves”, in a way that one-ups any Western version of the same term.

This dynamic, of paying people so poorly, who are often nationally disenfranchised, is not unique to the fishing industry. The media’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic seriously turned up the heat on the meat-packing industry back during the real thick of the pandemic. Meat packing plant workers, working in confined spaces, in wet, warm environments, were subject to rapid spread of COVID through working conditions. And indeed, when COVID-19 showed up in those environments, it rapidly spread to everyone in the plant. Testing was (and still is) weak, but it’s safe to say that if you worked in a plant, you were part of what I call the “COVID infectiousness experiment.” The answer to that is “Yes — COVID is very infectious.” But what was not reported, mostly because it wasn’t particularly interesting, was that the COVID death rates were nominal, or likely even under any national average. It’s hard to tell without extensive research. Writing about how the media has handled the pandemic will have to wait. But the short version is that if the storyline in this time doesn’t fit “COVID is the scourge of the ages” — it’s not going to get researched and published.

What I found more shocking and sad than any COVID-19 story about the meatpacking industry is the usual state of affairs extant in the labor situation in the meatpacking industry. A good hunk of the labor force consists of undocumented immigrants, paid a bare minimum wage, with lousy health care, working in slaughterhouses where the noise levels of screaming animals would make you wild. For folks that normally read this blog, yes — I am a meat eater, and I believe that a lack of saturated fat in our diets is actually condemning us to the metabolic syndrome/diabetes crisis that is fueling a part of our national collapse.

But at the same time, one can see where we have created a dynamic not unlike the dynamics on the various fishing boats of rising economies. These are jobs no one wants to do, and the reason for the paltry pay is not so much a factor of increased profits. It’s because if people were paid more, they would leave. Who wants to live in the middle of Iowa, in a collapsed town, in the middle of the winter? It might be palatable in the context of a tight community, where you were paid a living wage and could raise a family. But metaphorically and literally, that ship has sailed for the Somali and Mexican workers working in the business. The Somalis, of course, can’t leave to go back to Somalia with any hope of return. They are trapped on the U.S.S. Iowa. But the Mexicans, who used to at least enjoy the benefits of a more open border, are also trapped. And it’s safe to say that holding a minimum wage job in a slaughterhouse is not something that’s aspirational for future generations.

The problem exists in spades for other professions as well. Nations like the Philippines have long exported their people for low-end service workers. I’ve stood at the gate in the Manila airport where they out-process their people for shipping to other countries — most notably the UAE. And I can remember happier days yucking it up with all the pretty little Filipinas in the malls in Dubai ten years ago. But as the gap between rich and poor grow, one can see that there are larger emergent dynamics in how the system works. Once you drift away from some version of a culture that believes in the entitlement of a robust middle-class as part of any job category, slavery comes back with a vengeance. And there is obviously some line that gets crossed, wage-level-wise, that accelerates that prospect.

There are no easy answers to any of this — especially at the point where we are at right now. Robust workers’ movements require time, and are facilitated by education, both under increasing attack as the gap between rich and poor grow. A moribund, or even hostile body politic obviously doesn’t help, as well as persistent myths of “pulling one up by one’s bootstraps.”

I think it can help to recognize that these dynamics are emergent, however. They are not necessarily drummed up by evil corporate types, though it is also hard to believe that a discussion of the situation hasn’t come up in board rooms in places like Tyson Foods. They are emergent from wage differentials and the socioeconomic system. These systems also generate the demand for the kind of leadership, which inherently has to be low-empathy and insulated, or even empathy-disordered, that will keep the system going. It’s no surprise in the middle of the COVID outbreak that getting those workers back inside the plant became such a high priority — even if COVID itself did not turn out to be the mortal threat it has been portrayed as.

And while automation in the food industry undoubtedly will help — my good friend that is a director of research inside a large food automation firm has told me that the demand for automated solutions has never been higher — in the end, we have constructed a society where the denial of human potential is real, and growing. I liken it to collapsing soil around a large hole. More and more of us are standing on the edge of that hole, with our children in front of us. Declining generational wages are a sign that more and more of our children can, and will slip into that hole.

I strongly recommend reading/listening to Urbina’s book. But don’t stop there. Take the contents of this post and look around to where the same dynamic is happening. And let people know. The crisis we are having is fundamentally one of memetics – the old models of how we understand things simply are failing right and left. And change in the physical world will only happen once we change first our minds.